Notices and press releases timed for First Friday and Preview Thursday are out and around. One catching my eye is for Ali Fathollahi's exhibition, ADOLESCENCE, at Sin City Gallery. The Iranian-American artist, who recently completed a ZAP 8 public art project, is trained in illustration, graphic arts, and fine art at the Azad University, Tehran. He will continue developing his contemporary Persian diaspora by getting his second Masters degree, this time at UNLV. From the release:

Ali Fathollahi ﻿While City (2016) / ADOLESCENCE

In this innovative body of images, Fathollahi merges subtle details drawn from illustration with the provocative techniques of Surrealist collage as well as using found objects to construct strangely potent sculpture. The fascinating artist possesses a restrained but brilliant sensibility, expressed in remarkable work echoing motifs from classical painting, botanical illustration, and eroticism that he casts afloat in a beautiful framework of patterning and composition. In works like "Lost In Dream" (2016), the images seem a moment of fantastic dreaming, a sleeping face, black backgrounds intersected by geometry, quiet storms of falling flowers.